THE AMERICAN FRIEND
8/10 Wim Wenders’ noir thriller, starring Dennis Hopper.
When Wim Wenders talks about The
American Friend, he alludes to the ways in which his interpretation of Patricia Highsmith’s criminal hero, Tom Ripley, differs from the author’s. Some of this – most of it – was down to Dennis Hopper, who played Ripley while he was on the comedown from shooting Apocalypse Now. The German director has noted that Hopper brought an element of wildness to the role, fully embodying his own hope that Ripley would be “a man that was like nobody else”. This, Wenders says, was more important than being amoral. Or perhaps he said immoral. With the accent, it’s hard to be sure.
Possibly, Hopper’s Ripley is both. The character is an experiment in mistranslation, in a European film that adds a chill of regret to the pulpy manners of US noir. Wenders is paying tribute to the films he loved and employing some striking signposts: nicholas Ray plays the artist who is supposedly dead, forging his own work with decreasing amounts of care; Samuel Fuller is a gangster (“Der Amerikaner”). Wenders originally hoped to cast John Cassavetes as Ripley, which might have been a hat-tip too far to the strain of US filmmaking that infected and informed Wenders’ imagination.
Hopper certainly takes Ripley into some pretty strange places. For those whose notions of the actor are informed by Blue Velvet, he’ll seem restrained. (But only just. Look at him reclining on a pool table, taking Polaroid selfies.) Then again, given that Hopper plays the character as a cowboy, drifting between Hamburg, Paris and new York, it is a brand of restraint that wraps extremes of alienation in easy charisma. Blink, and you’ll miss the moment where Ripley, the dodgy dealer, takes offence at an auction and decides to enlist the terminally ill picture framer, Jonathan Zimmermann (Bruno Ganz), as a hitman. The way Wenders plays it, that moment – the crux of the film, and an idea that now looks like a preparatory sketch for Breaking Bad – is numbly existential. It’s not entirely plausible Zimmermann would fall for the scam, but the framer, once framed, has no choice but to follow the path others have plotted for him.
In the arc of Wenders’ career, there are two schools of thought about The American Friend. To purists it’s the moment where his restless European sensibility started to consume itself. But it’s a starkly beautiful contradiction, a thriller in which thrills are eschewed in favour of hollow restlessness, all of it beautifully filmed by the late Robby Müller. It’s a film about film in which free will is eroded; a bleak dream of escalators and airports with faint echoes of rock’n’roll. “There is a man in the train, I suppose,” Zimmermann says as he hurtles towards oblivion.
Extras: 6/10. Wenders intro, restoration doc.